Marcie's Big Adventure - Day 11/Ireland

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Hi Everyone,

Started the morning in a very long, huge, unbelievable, line to meet up with the Irish immigration and present my passport. Apparently very few were adhering to their assigned time slot. It took me 45 minutes to get through and out. Pretty fast considering the line of people literally went from 1 end of the ship to the other end and circled back! There were a lot of grumbling people in that line. Guess they really need their coffee in the morning and maybe they shouldn't have tried to beat the line by coming early. Instead, they created the line. I thought it moved pretty well conidering how many people were in the line. My excursion wasn't scheduled until 10:45 so I didn't care about the line or how long it took. One of my solo buddies, Ann from St. Augustine, was on my tour so we sat together. First we went to the Jameson whiskey distillery, the largest whiskey distillery in the world. It was pretty interesting. The same barrels are used for beer, moonshine and whiskey. It's a matter of how long the liquid stays ages as to what they will end up making with it. They only use their own products, they never add anything to it from another distillery. However, since in the US, distilleries can only utilize a barrel once, they buy the barrels from the US and they buy close to a million a year! In the aging process, product is lost to evaporation. That is called the Angel's Share and its just part of the cost of doing business. An 18 year old whiskey will lose 36% of it's volume over time. In an average year, this distillery will lose approximately the equivalent of 55,000 bottles of whiskey to evaporation. Our tour guide at the distillery obviously must have figured we were a bunch of folks from the poor side of town because not once did he tell us or try to sell any of us one of there $42,000 US bottles of whiskey! Clearly he wasn't working on commission. :-) After that was a drive over to Cork and through it's streets. Was surprised to see a Krispy Kreme and a Papa John's. It even had a Circle K gas station, which are very prevalent in Florida but I didn't realize there were international. It's a tad over $6.00 a gallon here. It was only about 50 degrees here, windy and drizzly. Didn't want to bring the bulky coat with me as I figured that we would be inside or on the bus most of the time so I decided to layer a couple tops. Fortunately, the tank top that I had brought to work out in was still totally pristine so I wore that under a 3/4 length sleeve top. It worked fine. I used my sunhat as my rain hat. That will probably be my uniform until I fly home on the 24th since we keep going north. Dinner tonight was in their specialty restaurant that came with my package. This was an Asian restaurant. 2 of my solo buddies came with me. I had great shrimp tempura, a lobster potsticker and chicken with peanut sauce. The table next to us, that got there before us, was all multi-stripe officers. That meant we were a little delayed in getting things started for us as they were getting a lot of great service from the restaurant servers. :-) We were sitting at the back of the ship and saw a beautiful sunset as we had dinner. Another great day! Hugs

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